Pixel Fighter ID

ITS FINALLY DONE!

This is easily the most time and effort I've ever put into any drawing of mine.

When I saw this on someone else's page, I just HAD to make my own, but I knew it wouldn't be easy and that it would require a lot of my patience.
So I started from what interested me the most: the pixel character.
So I found an appropriate program for the job, an incredible program called Pixen, ade especially for what I wanted it to do (I even made my balloon icon in it) and set off straight away. I put my pixel ID concept on a layer below my workspace and started tracing over it, but then I started having problems.

Yes, Pixen is an amazing program, but it is also in its VERY early beta stages, so i soon found that it was extremely prone to frequent crashes, and I lost a massive amount of work to this multiple times. So I decided to fiddle around in the settings and found a function that I could set to auto-save my work every 60 seconds, but I still saved my work after each major step because i was still too cautious.
So the program continued to crash, but I never lost anything after that.
So I finished the outline, did the colouring and saved for what was probably the 1000th time.

Then it was time for the background. I opened up Corel Painter Essentials 2 and got to work.
I made the background before switching over to Manga Studio Debut 3.0 to do the lines. This didn't take long and I switched back to Corel again.

I coloured in the lines I did in MSD3 and the BG of the portrait and smoothed out the lines and colour shading.

And now to throw it all together.
I opened up Photoshop Elements 4.0 and loaded the pixel character and the BG and placed everything just how I wanted it. Then I added the text and stats and the "CS" and saved!

I'm extremely proud of myself with this one because usually I know ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING about colouring or shading, and that was my biggest fear when doing this, but I'm extremely proud of the results.

And I just taught myself that if I put enough effort into something, it will turn out amazing.

That was an overly extensive comment, but I just thought that it needed a nice description

--
Tools Used:
Photoshop Elements 4.0 (Text, final touches and combining)
Manga Studio Debut 3.0 (Lines in portrait)
Pixen (Pixel Fighter)
Corel Painter Essentials 2 (Colouring)
Wacom Intuos Drawing Tablet